Das Referenz: Wikipedia Redesigned for iPad
medium.com
medium.com
I think the app looks great and compared to the desktop/mobile versions of the Wikipedia website, it is a significant improvement when it comes to readability. So what if it doesn't do justify or support editing content. Justify is a minor setting that can be easily implemented and editing could be a v2.0 feature if the project gains traction.
I love reading Kindle and iBooks on my iPad and it's fantastic that I can now access Wikipedia with the same readability features. You should definitely continue to make improvements, from tables to justification. Keep adding more integration with Wikidata. Maybe allow users to treat any Wikipedia article like an e-book by enabling notes, bookmarking, highlighting etc. I know it's hard to deal with ever changing content but maybe let the user save a specific version with highlight/notes to the iPad (and enable cloud sync).
But hey, on the plus side nit-picks can be useful to a project creator too, if only to help them anticipate people's objections better.
> The most important use case for Wikipedia is filling the search field and choosing the correct search result.
See ? That's why your redesign will never _ever_ be even considered by the Wikimedia team: The most important use case for Wikipedia is editing content.
Wikipedia has become what it is and lives because every single human can bring its knowledge and share it with other humans. The Wikimedia (and Wikipedia) team isn't involved in editing content: it "merely" hosts the application. It's up to us, the humans from everywhere, to fill Wikipedia with our knowledge, and it's up to you, the UX/UI designers, to make sure we have the best experience while doing it, so it doesn't feel clunky/difficult/unpleasant. If you remove the edit ability, you effectively kill Wikipedia.
Please stop this. (At least we agree on one point: there are too many attempts at redesigns, and too little work done on actually important projects[0])
Another reason might be that "Die" clashes with the English verb "to die".
That sounds questionable at best to me.
Including advertisements in a research resource lends itself to all sorts of moral problems, and quite frankly completely obliterates and chance of increased usefulness of the redesign.
This company is arguably improving the experience of viewing that content, and, as a consumer, as long as they're upfront about the ads/cost when I purchase the app (I haven't checked if they are yet), then the ball's in my court to decide whether it's worth the ads and/or the $3/$5 price tag. I can always use a free app or just go to my browser if I don't want to pay.
Or are you finding the fact that they're charging for a product that's built on top of a free service inherently questionable? I definitely vibe with that sentiment at times, but in this case, I can't see a problem with it, especially if it meets Wikipedia's restrictions/standards.
Or is there something else that you find questionable?
They don't mention the ads explicitly on the app page, but the app (with ads) is free, and you can see a list of top in-app purchases which clearly list "Remove Ads" alongside the associated price.
Yep, and it feels wonderful.
Wikipedia: please don't change. I'm not sold on the cult of Newer Is Better.
You can't know that Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign until you see that redesign. People 7 years ago thought their phones were just fine, until they saw the iPhone.
Edit: On reading further, i find that they did consider it, but decided against providing something that looks great and is helpful to the reader in 99.99999% of all cases, because the remaining 0.00001% don't look perfect. Instead they opt for a solution that is decidedly mediocre² in all cases. Brilliant.
² Note how in the header, Buchprodukti-on is hyphened very awkwardly, while Buchdrucks, a prime candidate, isn't at all.
Left justification is always preferable over bad full justification; I don't know many (read: any) typographers who would disagree.
The first of Tschichold's Penguin Composition Rules (always worth reading - http://s3.amazonaws.com/tsch/compositionrules.html) says: "All text composition should be as closely word-spaced as possible." By relying on automatic full justification, you violate that rule in cruel ways. "Wide spaces should be strictly avoided."
Edit to your edit: I don't particularly care for your appeal to authority when experience has borne out for me that wildly varying line lenghts hinder reading considerably more than occasional gaps. Besides, your authority doesn't even mention justification or alignment, as such i question your binding his statement to that matter.
This is the caption below a full-justified image with several words broken by hyphens - which looks awful, and, more importantly, is harder to read. I'd much rather deal with the occasional 'river' than read hyphen-wrapped words.
I'm looking forward for this one to be ported someday. I'd pay a couple bucks for it even.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia....
Wikipedia is not stuck in 2004, it's not stuck anywhere. It continues to grow, flourish and be useful to hundreds of millions of people over all sorts of connections and on all sorts of devices.
Thinking how much better wikipedia would be if it were beautiful is like thinking how much better your hammer would be if it were beautiful.
Also wikipedia has more technical dept than the worst govmnt project.
Just look at the php backend shit. The parser alone makes people blind. There does not exist a grammar.
You cannot process the content properly, because only their current php thing parses tge wkitext as the author intended, and it consists of 65% quirks and hacks.
The layout/ html rendering is 10y in the past. I can think of a dozen helpful things the html pages could do, but its not possible because of the rottten backend that literally takes minutes to render some articles.
And that with millions of donations. Wikimedia sucks so hard its almost like they purposefully want to wikipedia from evolving.
I consider that as a feature. I don’t mind text in 7pt on a small screen if it allows me to find more quickly what I’m looking for.
That said, if it does, I want it. Please port to everywhere.
Besides all that, I think it's a good bit of work. Well done devs.